iTWire Wednesday, 07 July 2021 11:49 Passwords: Your first and often weakest defence
Shares Aaron Bugal, Global Solutions Engineer, Sophos
Guest Opinion: Password security continues to be a challenge for people and businesses across the world, and in the wake of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack where a single password was the key to hackers breaching the entire network, businesses should assess their own password practices.
In a recent experiment by Sophos Labs, the cybersecurity team were able to guess, by hand, 17 of the top 20 passwords in
Have I Been Pwned’s Pwned Passwords in under two minutes.
So, if you are trusting your personal security to be protected by ‘qwerty’ or ‘12345’, you are setting yourself up to be hacked.
Have I Been Pwned goes open source, bags help from FBI theregister.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theregister.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Passwords are the most common way to protect our accounts. That’s why we should use strong, unique passwords for each online account. But as we have too many accounts on various websites and platforms, just remembering them isn’t real. For this, many of us use a password management app to keep track of them all. HaveIBeenPwned.com (HIBP) and Google Chrome’s password manager are among the most popular tools. The former also allows us to see whether our accounts were hacked.
Recently, HIBP’s creator Troy Hunt announced two major updates for the service. More interestingly, they have reached a partnership with the FBI. This simply means the latter will feed data from breaches into the service, increasing the amount of data available for anyone to check online.
Troy Hunt: Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the NET Foundation and Working with the FBI troyhunt.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from troyhunt.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.